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mapfi
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Zurich, Switzerland
Jul 2002
time: 06:26
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For me the game starts up fine, I also get into the map editor, but when I click PLAY in the game setup screen the game crashes without any messages. (I use Win XP)
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Nebula
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I downloaded and liked what I saw.
It runs fine on my system btw.
Some suggestions :
- Scrolling is funny. Scrolling would be better imo if it goes N/E/S/W
- Tooltips would be usefull.
- Zones around the mouse when in building mode would be usefull.
- How about a way of telling when a unit is active?
- Panic button to quit program - Escape to end or main menu for instance
Editor :
- Right mouse button to erase.
Bug :
- When scrolling down/right it stops at a certain point this when Scrolling down/left is possible.
- Manual does not load graphics in wordpad. It only shows the text after having to press buttons on a requester a number of times.
Edit ****
- In the editor mode when pressing on the left icon the map is edited.
- When pressing on the map a unit apears to be selected when no unit is visible. (Happened several times)
Looking forward to new versions. Mini map would be real usefull.
Last edited by Nebula on 17-02-2003 at 19:17
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Dale
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Sir! Why do you keep clicking on me?
Dec 2000
time: 15:26
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Well I'm back from holidays, and pretty tanned.  Ahhh....... the Aussie sun. 
Thanks to everyone who tried Empire. It's great to get some feedback. Now to those answers.......
Pedrunn:
It looks like it might be related to graphic hardware on the PC (see below). What graphics card have you got?
Nebula:
- I chose scrolling on the diagonals, because of the simple reason that my maps x and y axis run on the diagonals. The x-axis is on the top-right/bottom-left directions, and the y-axis is on the top-left/bottom-right directions. It's logical once you get used to it.
- Tooltips will be coming. They're additions for a later build. I feel it's more necessary to get the basic game running first.
- Building zones will also be coming soon. When you build a building, a red (can't build) or green (can build) shadow of the building will appear.
- A selection border around the active unit will also be coming soon too.
- Actually, I used to have CNTRL-SHIFT as my "boss key".  Maybe I should put it back in.
- To erase in map editor, you could use ocean.  Nah, an erasor will be coming.
Bugs:
- When scrolling down-right and the map stops, you've hit the bottom of the world. Because the y-axis is on that diagonal, there are limitations to the top-left/bottom-right scroll distances.
- Manual graphics. I whipped up the manual in about 30 minutes, and I know I forgot to embed the graphics in the word document. I'll have something better done for the next version.
quote:
- In the editor mode when pressing on the left icon the map is edited.
- When pressing on the map a unit apears to be selected when no unit is visible. (Happened several times)
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I don't get what you mean by these two. A bit more info please.
Matt:
- Thanks for the help on the font surface error. I must admit I was a bit stumped. I'm running a Geforce4 so I couldn't replicate it in any way at all. However I'll change the dimensions for the surfaces and see if it has an effect (I know someone IRL who has the problem so I'll get them to test it first).
- See my comments for Nebula. It's quite logical when you get used to it.
- Minimise/maximise is a bug I need to fix.
- Selecting cities. Yes, it is intentional that a city only selects when it has a barracks. At this time. It will change in the future when more of the city features are in the game.
- Mouse clicks. No not your stupidity, the game input routines. Because the game runs at 10 frames a second I had to put in a "SlowMeDown" function. What was happening was if you clicked once, it registered about 5 or 6 times. Not good, so I put in the SlowMeDown. I will shrink the impact of this though.
General comments:
Thanks everyone for taking some time to test this. It's extremely useful and appreciated. I know I've said "this is coming" to a lot of things, but remember what an alpha build is: an initial build. As part of the development process, alpha builds are perfect for getting parts of an application tested. Of course this means a lot of stuff is either not functioning correctly, not complete or not even in yet. For instance, the combat model in that alpha build is definitely NOT what's going in the release version. I have a fantastic idea for combat, based around a tactical 5x5 chess board, with ranged combat, bombarding from catapults and even flanking manouveres. However, it'll be a few alpha versions later by the time it gets in.
As always, keep your ears to the ground as I take this game seriously, and will upload regular public alphas.
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LDiCesare
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La Ferté sous Jouarre France
Jan 2001
time: 05:26
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Hi Dale, hex. Nice alpha game. I have a few comments.
The most important one:
Don't use a .doc for the manual. It is huge, I mean really huge, because of the screenshots I guess, and it takes forever loading in StarOffice (I don't own and won't get legally or otherwise MSWord). I am afraid downloading the full manual when it is done will take more time than the game unless you can reduce the size of it (what format do you used for images in the .doc?) Whatever else (html, pdf, txt) would be better from my point of view.
On the game itself:
I ran the game without a problem on XP.
The game is nice looking. The graphics are really good, although units might look better sharpened a bit.
The combat display screen is something I like. Seeing the numbers change is a good interface for me. Reminds me of MOO ground combat.
Your last post shows you know what you need to do next (highlighting selected unit for instance). Here are a few critics:
You should not sport ai labels in the opening screen if you have no ai. That's cosmetic but puzzling if you read the manual too fast.
You shouldn't put the End button near a corner since I may scroll instead of ending my turn or vice versa. Put it somewhere there is no risk of confusion, like in the middel bottom of the screen.
Iron and stone icons look like too much one another. I tried building units with stone thinking it asked for stone.
Moving units is a lot of guess-clicking for now. It looks like units remember move orders from one turn to another but you have to click on the boot icon to make them move, which means you have to select each of them every turn for them to move. No point remember move orders in that case. I once managed to get a unit moving in the exact opposite direction of what I wanted through some clickfest.
Combat needs a model in which 500 + 250 + 50 units don't lose 104 units to 50 pikemen. Building archers should result in archers instead of pikemen, too. I guess all that is to be developped.
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mapfi
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Zurich, Switzerland
Jul 2002
time: 06:26
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Got it to work now after all, still without the devel build. It seems that the game doesn't appreciate to be installed on the desktop but rather wants to be in some simpler folder path?
Somehow I couldn't build watchtowers and castles even though I had the resources and I don't like the diagonal scrolling either. Everything else lloks fine for now.
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Velociryx
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of Candle'Bre
Apr 1999
time: 05:26
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Took me a bit longer than I thought to get enough time to do a test justice, but I got there!
Just finished giving it a test drive, and I'm impressed!
Game started without a hitch....I was aware, from the reading here that the game opened over open water, so rather than hunting, I simply ended my turn, and from then on, the game cycled correctly to each player's capitol.
The graphics are....awesome!
My first recommendation in looking at the structure of the game would be to either increase the amount of starting player resources slightly, or introduce something similar to "goody huts" to later builds of the game. Since things move somewhat more slowly in the TBS realm, having more starting resources, or at least some means of potentially getting a small boon (the huts), would give players more options in those early turns (of course, make it optional, since huts tend to unbalance things if you want to balance for MP environment)--or, maybe there are goody huts, but just none on my starting island...
I noted the same problem that Mark reported....when I minimized the game to check something in the manual, then came back to the game, I had the sword icon, and a black screen that never would redraw. Had to quit the game via the task manager and restart, but other than that, everything you've completed thus far is working properly....I built myself a Merchant "thingy" and a Watch Tower, then moved my grand army out to go meet the green gringo I was sharing the island with....several turns later, we met and engaged in brutal combat, which I lost narrowly....
Couple of things regarding combat...as it stands, it's fairly much a static thing....I saw no option to withdraw from the battle, nor any means of directing my troops to do any particular thing....for armies of the default starting size, the combat was okay (took about 40 seconds), but I can imagine that as the game goes on, and people begin building armies of increasing size, you might want to have a way to automate the combat process, lest folks spend an undue amount of time watching the numbers wind down in an attack or defense. One possible thought too, might be to scale back the starting force to something along the lines of 50 or so pike (an honor guard?) and give the player some resource equivalencies for the troops....in this way, right off the bat, the player has some tough choices to make....expand that military, or hope for long enough peace so that investments to infrastrucutre pay dividends?
GREAT stuff so far! I'm digging it!
-=Vel=-
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Dale
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Sir! Why do you keep clicking on me?
Dec 2000
time: 15:26
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 Attachment: screen2.jpg
This has been downloaded 62 time(s).
Last edited by Dale on 05-04-2003 at 07:46
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Dale
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Sir! Why do you keep clicking on me?
Dec 2000
time: 15:26
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Attachment: screen3.jpg
This has been downloaded 55 time(s).
Last edited by Dale on 05-04-2003 at 07:55
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16-02-2003 10:54
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